As I sit down to write this piece in November of 2020, U.S. President Donald J. Trump is insisting that he was victorious in the recent U.S. presidential election, an election he claims the media and the opposing party have conspired to steal from him through widespread voter suppression and fraud. It’s difficult to determine how much sway his arguments are having; whether any of those who voted for him agree that he will end up with a second term, legitimately earned. What is clear, however, is that he and his supporters within the administration are playing fast and loose with the truth, as they have been from the beginning, and even before, his first term in office. Though the term “post-truth” is receiving less attention now than it was in 2016, when it was declared by the Oxford English Dictionary to be the word of the year, the task of thinking through the meaning and implications of living in a post-truth society remains urgent.
Post-truth is defined in the OED as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” where the “post” in post-truth means not just “after,” but rather that the concept it specifies has become unimportant or irrelevant. Given this definition, it’s no surprise that responsibility for our post-truth condition has been laid at the feet of postmodern thinkers, with whom Rorty is often identified. Rorty’s sustained attack on Truth seems ripe for association with the move to a political landscape where truth itself is “unimportant and irrelevant.” Without truth, Rorty’s critics think, he – and we – are left without a way of asserting facts, or appealing to experts, or rationally persuading others. Consider the debate between Daniel Dennett and Rorty, during which Dennett wrote, “In the end, Rorty tells us, it is all just ‘conversations,’ and there are only political or historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing conversation” (Dennett 1999, 41). Though Dennett acknowledges that Rorty was no simple relativist, he worries that his “large and enthralled readership” might well be: “when his readers enthusiastically interpret him as encouraging their postmodernist skepticism about truth, they trundle down paths he himself has refrained from traveling” (Dennett 1999, 42).[1] These sorts of worries emerge again when Dennett responds, in a 2017 interview, that postmodernists are to blame for our post-truth condition:
Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers aren’t quite so innocuous after all. Sometimes, views can have terrifying consequences that might actually come true. I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts (Dennett, 2017).
Thus, one might read Dennett as saying that, though Rorty does not bear direct responsibility for our post-truth condition, his work nevertheless played a role in its emergence.
A similar point is made by Joshua Forstenzer, who cites Dennett when he contends that Rorty’s philosophical project “bears some intellectual responsibility for the onset of post-truth politics, insofar as it took a complacent attitude towards the dangers associated with over-affirming the contingency of our epistemic claims” (Forstenzer 2018, 4). Forstenzer’s concern is that Rorty should have foreseen that his metaphilosophical project could be harnessed to illiberal ends, and, having foreseen it, modified his project in some way in order to avoid that outcome.[2] Rather than adding yet another voice to the chorus of those calling for a consideration of how Rorty’s critique of Truth might have contributed to our post-truth condition, I explore some of the other resources available in his work. In particular, I look at how Rorty’s conception of the self as a web of beliefs and desires, or as an incarnated vocabulary, sheds light on the pervasive and persistent sense of unraveling that accompanies life in a post-truth society.
One can respond to our post-truth condition either by attempting to shore up common sense conceptions of truth and inquiry, or by proposing new conceptions. Rorty’s proposal is to adopt the ironist’s stance. Rorty’s ironist plays a different game than the metaphysician. Rather than assuming it’s possible to discover the true nature of reality or the true nature of the self, the ironist understands that any particular description of reality or of the self we might adopt is adopted for contingent reasons. She recognizes that such descriptions are contingent on the time and place in which she was born, on the descriptions she’s inherited from her culture or adopted as a result of her own engagement with actual and fictional others. Because the ironist understands that even her self-description is contingent and, in the end, optional, she doesn’t take herself too seriously (CIS, 74). She recognizes that she is nothing other than her description, or the narrative that she tells to herself and others.
Rorty borrows from Dennett the idea that selves are “centers of narrative gravity” (TP, 105). Elsewhere, he characterizes selves as “incarnated vocabularies” and as “centerless webs of beliefs and desires” (CIS, 88). The vocabularies that constitute the self are not static, of course. They undergo an “ordinary process of reweaving … often in unpredictable ways” (TP, 107). The ironist can reweave her own final vocabulary when she experiences “radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses” (CIS 73). She goes in search of descriptions better suited to who she is and who she wants to be. Moreover, the project of weaving and reweaving one’s own final vocabulary – indeed, of any final vocabulary – is unending, save by the interruption of death. The working out of our individual and our collective final vocabularies is never completed: “It cannot get completed because there is nothing to complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven, a web which time lengthens every day” (CIS, 42-43). The ironist’s final vocabulary can be rewoven, and she does so by comparing her existing final vocabulary to other, compelling final vocabularies that she comes across.
Yet an individual’s final vocabulary, according to Rorty, is never woven out of whole cloth. Her final vocabulary — the web of beliefs and desires that makes her who she is — depends on already existing vocabularies. Even the final vocabulary of the strongest poet — the figure Rorty discusses in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity who manages to escape her inherited descriptions — is parasitic on its precursors; she can “give birth only to a small part of herself” (CIS, 41). In sum, a self is nothing other than a final vocabulary — a collection of words that a person uses “to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives” (CIS, 73). A person’s final vocabulary is an amalgam of inherited elements, i.e., common sense descriptions that are widely shared, of elements found through encounters with strange and compelling descriptions, and, in some very rare instances, novel descriptions that she herself has created.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty devotes a chapter to George Orwell’s 1984. In that chapter, he focuses specifically on the character of O’Brien, the member of the Inner Party who ultimately captures and tortures the protagonist, Winston. O’Brien is a warning, Rorty claims, that a possible world where anyone can inflict pain and humiliation on another person is only a few, contingent possibilities away.[3] Even though Rorty focuses primarily on the lessons to be learned from O’Brien – “the last third of 1984 is about O’Brien, not Winston – about torturing, not about being tortured,” (CIS 180) Rorty claims – Winston is instructive too. He shows us what O’Brien’s cruelty looks like from the perspective of the victim, of what it means to have one’s self stripped away by pain and humiliation.
Rorty contends that “pain is nonlinguistic. It is what we human beings have that ties us to the nonlanguage-using beasts” (Rorty 1989, 94). However, Winston’s suffering at the hands of O’Brien
reminds us that human beings who have been socialized … share a capacity which other animals lack. They can all be given a special kind of pain: they can all be humiliated by the forcible tearing down of the particular structures of language and belief in which they were socialized (or which they pride themselves on having formed for themselves) (CIS, 177).
Humiliation, therefore – “making the things that seemed most important” to a person “look futile, obsolete, and powerless” (CIS, 89) – involves rending a person’s final vocabulary, making it so that they can no longer use the language they once did to understand who they are. Building on the work of Elaine Scarry, Rorty claims that
the worst thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she cannot reconstitute herself. The idea is to get her to do or say things – and, if possible, believe and desire things, think thoughts – which later she will be unable to cope with having done or thought” (CIS, 177-178; emphasis added).
The pain and humiliation Winston suffers does not just take away his final vocabulary; it renders him incapable of having any final vocabulary whatsoever.
Rorty draws attention to the idea that those who suffer humiliation are deprived of the ability to tell a coherent story about their lives; the powers of description and redescription are taken from them. They are “so racked by pain as to be unable to learn a language” (CIS, 35-36). This sort of pain is the only power the world or the self can have over us, Rorty thinks. He rejects the traditional, metaphysical view that suggests that the “world out there” or “human nature as such” have the power to impose on us a particular description of them. But the power the world and the self do have is to leave us language-users without any vocabulary at all. The world “can blindly and inarticulately crush us” and “mute despair, intense mental pain, can cause us to blot ourselves out” (CIS, 40).[4] When a person is humiliated, she becomes “incapable of having a self because she becomes incapable of weaving a coherent web of belief and desire” (CIS, 178). Having been humiliated, it becomes more and more difficult for a person to weave a coherent story about themselves; doing so becomes increasingly a matter of heroism.
Dennett has also called upon Orwell to help make sense of our post-truth condition. He writes:
George Orwell warned us that the Ministry of Truth in a totalitarian state could brainwash the citizenry with a heavy-handed onslaught of propaganda and torture, but it turns out that even in an apparent democracy, using methods that all can see (no secret torture chambers, no burning of books and newspapers), people can be put into a dreamlike state of misinformation from which they cannot readily be aroused by the most evidence-rich and eloquently posed alarms. Wake up, wake up, my fellow Americans! Can you not see what these people are doing to our precious and fragile democracy? (Dennett 2020).
I think Dennett is correct to note that the sort of effects Orwell was concerned with can be brought about not just through propaganda and torture. Because the final vocabulary that constitutes a self (whether that person is an ironist or not) is never entirely under one’s control – for most of us, our final vocabulary is made up almost entirely of inherited descriptions – the reweaving of that vocabulary is not entirely under one’s control either. A person’s final vocabulary can also be rewoven, and even torn apart, by others.
Rorty’s consideration of this possibility provides us with new ways to think through the experience of living in a post-truth society. In a post-truth society, those strands of our inherited vocabulary that either wholly constitute or are interwoven with the chosen or created strands of our final vocabularies are undergoing radical changes. The stories we’ve used to understand ourselves and our moral, political, and epistemic relationships to each other are being torn apart. In a post-truth society, the fabric so carefully woven over years and decades – the fabric of democracy, as Dennett rightly notes – begins to fray and become threadbare, sometimes to the point where it cannot be rewoven. This sense of unraveling can be helpfully illuminated by Rorty’s concept of the self as an incarnated vocabulary that is vulnerable to pain and humiliation. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, like Winston. Our ability to tell coherent narratives about ourselves, both individually and collectively, is undermined by out post-truth condition. We can hope that the humiliation and pain that has been caused in recent years in the U.S. has not been so severe that we, individually and collectively, are unable to weave together new vocabularies and new selves.
[1] He also writes, “although Dick was indeed a hero to the postmodernists, and was often cited—and misconstrued—by them, in fact he had a much more nuanced and defensible position to offer to anybody who would join open-mindedly in discussion, and he had very high standards for what counted as a worthy move in the “conversation” he urged philosophers to engage in” (Dennett, 2007).
[2] Forstenzer distinguishes between complicity (enabling or facilitating a wrongdoing), causation (increasing the antecedent likelihood of a particular phenomenon coming to pass), and complacency (“failing to demonstrate an awareness of, and thus of failing to effectively challenge, important threats to the realization of its moral vision” (21)). He charges Rorty’s project not with complicity or causality, but with complacency.
[3] Rorty writes, “O’Brien, the well-informed, well-placed, well-adjusted, intelligent, sensitive, educated member of the Inner Party, is more than just alarming. He is as terrifying a character as we are likely to meet in a book.” The reason he is so terrifying is that Orwell managed “to convince us that O’Brien is a plausible character-type of a possible future society” (CIS, 183).
[4] What I offer here is a first attempt at thinking through the relevance of humiliation for thinking through our post-truth condition. I do not want to suggest everyone is or has been equally humiliated by our post-truth condition. Nor do I want to suggest there are no other ways in which folks are humiliated in the sense Rorty intends. As Kenneth W. Stikkers has recently and provocatively pointed out, Rorty’s vaunted liberal tradition “has not been, as Rorty tells it, a tradition of ‘institutions and customs, which were designed to diminish cruelty, make possible government by the consent of the governed, and permit as much domination-free communication as possible to take place’ but rather a linguistic tradition, a language game, that conceals just the opposite” (Stikkers 2020, 138).
References
Dennett, Daniel et. al. 2020. “‘How do we become a serious people again?’ Dave Eggers, Annie Proulx and more on the 2020 election”. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/24/how-do-we-become-a-serious-people-again-dave-eggers-annie-proulx-and-more-on-the-2020-election. October 24, 2020. Accessed, November 18, 2020.
Dennett, Daniel and Stephen Metcalf. 2007. “Richard Rorty: What made him a crucial American philosopher?”. June 15, 2007. Slate.com. https://slate.com/culture/2007/06/richard-rorty-remembered.html. Accessed November 27, 2020.
Dennett, Daniel and Carole Cadwalladr. 2017. “Daniel Dennett: ‘I begrudge every hour I have to spend worrying about politics’”. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/12/daniel-dennett-politics-bacteria-bach-back-dawkins-trump-interview. February 12, 2017. Accessed November 18, 2020.
Dennett, Daniel. 1999. “Why Getting it Right Matters: Postmodernism and Truth”. Free Inquiry 20(1): 40-43. https://dl.tufts.edu/concern/pdfs/5999ng047. Accessed November 27, 2020.
Forstenzer, Joshua. 2018. “Something Has Cracked: Post-Truth Politics and Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism”. Ash Center Occasional Papers. https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/post-truth-politics-rorty.pdf
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stikkers, Kenneth W. 2020. “We Liberal, Ironic Hypocrites: Situating Rorty in the History of American Democratic Thought”. In Beyond Rorty, edited by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński. Lanham: Lexington Books.
